Narrative and Identity

On Galen Strawson's Criticism of Narrativity

by Andrei Buleandra

draft only

This paper challenges Galen Strawson’s proposed distinction between two ways of experiencing the self: the Synchronic... more This paper challenges Galen Strawson’s proposed distinction between two ways of experiencing the self: the Synchronic and the Diachronic. While the Diachronic experiences his self as existing in the past, present and future, for the Synchronic the self is fully in the present. According to Strawson, a Diachronic view of the self is an essential ingredient of adopting a Narrative attitude towards one’s self. By contrast, a Synchronic or Episodic personality has no need for defining one’s self through narrative. I will argue that this distinction is in tension with our ordinary concepts of self and identity. These concepts have essential connections with the commitments and self-constituting decisions we make. We usually define ourselves in terms of what we care about or what we take to be important and Narrativity is just our way of keeping track of these crucial commitments (MacIntyre, 1981; Taylor 1989; Frankfurt 1998; McAdams 2001). These conceptual connections become prominent when we consider widespread phenomena like losing one’s self or going through an identity crisis. I will argue that the Narrativity view of the self, the view criticized by Strawson, has the conceptual resources to accurately describe and explain these phenomena. By contrast, Strawson’s proposed distinction is in direct conflict with these significant psychological facts and cannot account for our intuitions regarding them.

'We live beyond any tale that we happen to enact'

by Galen Strawson

published in Harvard Review of Philosophy 18 (2012) pp. 73–90

Some say [1] we all experience or conceive of their own lives as a narrative or story of some sort. Many more say [2]... more Some say [1] we all experience or conceive of their own lives as a narrative or story of some sort. Many more say [2] we ought to do this. I think both these claims are false (cp Strawson 2004). Many go on to claim something more specific: we not only experience our own lives as a narrative of some sort; [3] we ‘constitute our identity’ as a person or self in this way (the ‘narrative self-constitution thesis’). Others again claim that [4] we ought to constitute our identity in this way. Again I reject both these claims. People are very different; there are different good ways to be and to live. I consider Emerson, Nietzsche, Proust and Woolf—among others. Suppose Socrates is right (it may be doubted) that the unexamined life is not a life for a human being: suppose he’s right that self-examination is always a good thing. Even so, the narrative approach is not the only way to do it, nor the best way. I advise against it.

Narratives of identity, home, and return of Kosovarian refugees: Steps toward a postmodern sense of agency

by Marco Gemignani

The Limits of Narrative: Provocations for the Medical Humanities

by Angela Woods

Medical Humanities Journal (2011) Volume 37 Pages 73-78

This paper aims to (re)ignite debate about the role of narrative in the medical humanities. It begins with a critical... more This paper aims to (re)ignite debate about the role of narrative in the medical humanities. It begins with a critical review of the ways in which narrative has been mobilised by humanities and social science scholars to understand the experience of health and illness. I highlight seven dangers or blind spots in the dominant medical humanities approach to narrative, including the frequently unexamined assumption that all human beings are ‘naturally narrative’. I then explore this assumption further through an analysis of philosopher Galen Strawson's influential article ‘Against Narrativity’. Strawson rejects the descriptive claim that “human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative” and the normative claim that “a richly Narrative outlook is essential to a well-lived life, to true or full personhood”. His work has been taken up across a range of disciplines, but its implications in the context of health and illness have not yet been sufficiently discussed. This article argues that ‘Against Narrativity’ can and should stimulate robust debate within the medical humanities regarding the limits of narrative, and concludes by discussing a range of possibilities for venturing ‘beyond narrative’.

What I am, as I am, when I am.

by Gestur Hilmarsson

Paper written for a seminar on Self/Identity, taught by Prof. Páll Skúlason at the University of Iceland in March 2012

A paper outlining Sartre's theory of the Self according to his book Transcendence of the Ego, which I then compare to... more A paper outlining Sartre's theory of the Self according to his book Transcendence of the Ego, which I then compare to the theories of Kristján Kristjánsson and finally Paul Ricoeur.

Villains, Victims, and the Financial Crisis: Positioning Identities through Descriptions

by Andrea Whittle

Chapter 7, in Constructing Identity in and around Organizations
Edited by Majken Schultz, Steve Maguire, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas (Oxford University Press, 2012)

This chapter draws insights from the field of Discursive
Psychology (DP) to examine the identity positioning... more This chapter draws insights from the field of Discursive
Psychology (DP) to examine the identity positioning employed in the
narratives surrounding the financial crisis. Existing narrative, discursive,
and communicative approaches to studying identity have tended
to focus on more or less explicit identity-talk, where participants produce
direct accounts of themselves or others. What is less well understood
is how descriptions of objects, actions, and events perform
identity work. This chapter contributes by showing how DP enables
us to understand how apparently “neutral” and “factual” descriptive
accounts act as a form of identity positioning.We focus our analysis on
the identity positions constructed during a public hearing involving
senior banking executives in the United Kingdom. The analysis suggests
that two competing identities, victim and villain, were constructed for
the bankers in the dialogue between the witnesses (bankers) and the
questioners (politicians).We argue that apparently neutral descriptions
of events, such as accounts of what happened and why, can represent
methods of positioning identity.We propose that a “discursive devices”
approach, inspired by DP, contributes to the understanding of identity
positioning by highlighting the power of micro-linguistic tools in laying
out the moral landscape of the characters involved in the description.
We conclude by arguing that the characters and stories
surrounding the financial crisis are important because they acted to
shape how the crisis was made sense of and acted upon.

Bankers in the Dock: Moral Storytelling in Action

by Andrea Whittle

Human Relations January 2012 vol. 65 no. 1 111-139

This article draws on insights from a variety of fields, including discursive psychology, ethnomethodology, dramatism,... more This article draws on insights from a variety of fields, including discursive psychology, ethnomethodology, dramatism, rhetoric, ante-narrative analysis and conversation analysis, to examine the discursive devices employed in the storytelling surrounding the recent financial crisis. Discursive devices refer to the linguistic styles, phrases, tropes and figures of speech that, we propose, are central to the development of a compelling story. We focus our analysis on the moral stories constructed during a public hearing involving senior banking executives in the UK. The analysis suggests that two competing storylines were used by the bankers and their questioners to emplot the events preceding the financial crisis. We propose that a discursive devices approach contributes to the understanding of storytelling by highlighting the power of micro-linguistic tools in laying out the moral landscape of the story. We argue that the stories surrounding the financial crisis are important because they shaped how the crisis was made sense of and acted upon.

Petkovska, S. "Second life as technological narrative: Dandellion/@ Kimban: A story of a virtual world" (2010)

by Sanja Petkovska

Trauma and Memory: The Impact of Apartheid-Era Forced Removals on Coloured Identity in Cape Town

by Henry Trotter

in Mohamed Adhikari (Ed.), Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2009), pp. 49-78

Communities often cohere around memories of historical suffering: yet coloured South Africans, a people whose diverse... more Communities often cohere around memories of historical suffering: yet coloured South Africans, a people whose diverse ancestry experienced enslavement, dispossession, genocidal extermination, and apartheid degradation, for the most part, they do not invest in remote historical traumas. Most coloured Capetonians instead focus upon a painful experience within living memory: the forced eviction of 150,000 coloured people from their homes and communities in the Cape Peninsula between 1957 and 1985 under the Group Areas Act. It is this experience that gives coloured identity vital resonance, especially amongst working class people, many of whom have yet to overcome the losses of that trauma.

Based on over one hundred life history interviews with coloured and African forced removees, this article examines the impact of Group Areas evictions on contemporary coloured identity. It suggests that, in the wake of mass social trauma, coloured removees coped with their pain by reminiscing with each other about the "good old days" in the destroyed communities. Their removal to racially defined townships ensured that they mainly shared their memories with other coloured people, and much less with African or Indian removees.

Apartheid social engineering to a large extent thus determined the spatial limits within which coloured memories circulated, creating a reflexive, mutually reinforcing pattern of narrative traffic. Over the past four decades, the constant circulation of these nostalgic stories has developed a "narrative community" amongst coloured people in the townships. This experience of popular sharing and support in the context of loss today gives coloured identity in Cape Town a dimension that would be lacking if it were only mobilized for political or economic purposes.

"Ako je došao silom, on ne ostaje": narativi o konverziji u neoprotestantskim zajednicama // "If he came by force, he would not stay": narratives on conversion in Romanian neo-Protestant communities

by Aleksandra Djurić-Milovanović

Interkulturalnost, no. 3, 2012

How Does the Self Adjudicate Narratives?

by Serife Tekin

Forthcoming in Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology

Travelling between Two Worlds-the Tergdaleulebi, their Identity Conflict and National Life

by Oliver Reisner

Significações do trabalho nas narrativas do eu: estratégias comunicacionais da marca Nextel na campanha “Bem-vindo ao Clube”

by Vander Casaqui

A campanha publicitária da marca de serviços telefônicos Nextel é analisada sob a ótica das teorias do trabalho e do... more A campanha publicitária da marca de serviços telefônicos Nextel é analisada sob a ótica das teorias do trabalho e do consumo. Discutimos os significados das narrativas construídas pelos sujeitos que protagonizam os filmes, ao apresentarem suas trajetórias erráticas de vida, em relação às expectativas do outro, como traços identitários associados ao universo simbólico de Nextel. Nessas narrativas, o trabalho é destaque, como esfera de desafio e de afirmação, de identificação e de estranhamento, de perspectivas de fracasso e de conquista do sucesso. A reflexão sobre a espetacularização e a estetização da intimidade, por meio da midiatização das narrativas do eu, serve como base para a compreensão do papel da atividade produtiva na vinculação de sujeitos em comunidades imaginadas pela linguagem publicitária.

Meanings of work embedded in narratives of the self: communication strategies in Nextel’s “Welcome to the Club” campaign

by Vander Casaqui

The advertising campaign of the phone service brand Nextel is analyzed from the perspective of work and consumption... more The advertising campaign of the phone service brand Nextel is analyzed from the perspective of work and consumption theories. We discuss the meanings of the narratives constructed by the subjects who star the movies, when submitting their erratic paths of life, relating to someone else’s expectations, as identity features associated with the symbolic universe of Nextel. Within these narratives, the work is highlighted as area of challenge and affirmation, of identification and strangeness, of prospects of failure and success achievement. The discussion on the spectacle and the aesthetics of intimacy, through the media process on the narratives of the self, serves as a basis for understanding the role of productive activity on linking individuals in imagined communities by advertising language.

Sacred Structures: Narrating Lifeworlds and Implications for Urban Arts Education Practice

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2011). Sacred structures: Narrating lifeworlds and implications for urban arts education practice. Studies in Art Education, 53 (2), 112-124.

Utilizing the story of an art studio project involving second grade students in a new urban elementary school as they... more Utilizing the story of an art studio project involving second grade students in a new urban elementary school as they explored and engaged with architectural spaces in their community during their yearlong study of the theme of “Community,” the purpose of this writing is to theorize and codify some major tenets of a narrative and reinterpretive approach to urban arts & design education pedagogy—one that recognizes and draws upon the colliding experiences and environments of urban living as an asset to the (re)constitution of identity and community.

Hvem er "jeg"? Om det narrative og det dialogiske i Samuel Becketts trilogi Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable [Who is "I". On Narrativity and Dialogism i Samuel Beckett's trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable]

by John Thobo-Carlsen

Published in Ove Christensen og Claus Falkenstrøm (eds.): På kant med værket. Modernismestudier 4. København: Akademisk forlag 2004, pp. 105-130.

Permanence on my Part: Embodiment in Ricoeur's Oneself as Another

by Timothy Burns

Justifying Belief within the Christian Identity Movement An Exercise in Memetics

by Levi Keach

Senior Honors thesis for University of Kansas Anthropology department, advised by Professor John Hoopes.

This paper examines the origins and utility of the key proof memes of the Christian Identity Movement, a heterogeneous... more This paper examines the origins and utility of the key proof memes of the Christian Identity Movement, a heterogeneous racialist subsection of North American Protestant Christianity. These memes have been gathered by looking at conversion oriented texts of three diverse ministries that are commonly held to be members of the Christian Identity movement: Christogenea, The Ecclesiastical Council for the Restoration of Covenant Israel, and Mission to Israel. This paper traces the origins of the memes through primary texts of the Christian Identity movement and its direct ancestor, British Israelism, while addressing their utility within historical context. This paper will serve as a case-study in the value of claims about the past providing legitimacy and proof to fringe religious movements.

Dialogics, Identity and Self-Narration in European Internet Communications: Operationalising the Research.

by Charlie Mansfield

Presentation at l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris within the « Atelier Internet : réseaux, savoirs et territoires »
on the invitation of
Éric GUICHARD, 19 March 1999, ENS rue d'ULM

SELF-NARRATION is a method of making a comprehensible history of the past. The re- narration of the self in... more SELF-NARRATION is a method of making a comprehensible history of the past. The re- narration of the self in psychoanalytic dialogue is effective because the analysand appropriates story spaces to form their own narratives for their previous behaviours. (Bernstein 1995; 64) (Mansfield 1999). Identity is formed during the process of self-narration as beliefs are tested. For beliefs to have the value of true beliefs they must be acquired without indoctrination or censorship; if there is a mark of the origin of the indoctrination in the belief then this is a false belief (Bernstein 1995: 65). The value in western European culture for belief acquisition to take place without the mark of the origin is when the belief is acquired in the field of reason and in an ideal speech situation. Self- reflection is a way to remove any deception which may have taken place during the acquisition of beliefs. Thus, a belief acquired during re-narration of the self will have the value of a true belief and will go towards the formation of personal values and self-identity. Habermasian self-reflection is both cognitive and tragic. "Narratives represent events not as instances of general laws but rather as elements of a history where a continuing or collective subject suffers or brings about dramatic ie meaningful, changes. A change is meaningful in virtue of its relation to past and future events." (Bernstein 1995; 62) "Constructing narratives involves eliciting connections between events by describing them in one way rather than another." "In narrative self-reflection we rehearse past events as turning points in a life-history." (Bernstein 1995; 62) By using a theoretical language, available to us in the present, we can re-narrate events from our past in a such a way as to come to a new self-understanding using those events which did not make sense at the time.

Responsibility in Social Research
A basic research issue in Europe's Information Society is the production and social value of knowledge. The Information Society is rapidly giving way to a new Knowledge Society and "... the importance of knowledge is increasingly being recognised today. We are living in a society that is characterised as much by the production of knowledge as by anything else ... can social scientific knowledge provide society with a discourse of renewal and critique or will it suffer the fate of increased specialisation and academization?" (Delanty 1997: 5).

Emerging Culture Conflict Mediation: A Field Manual for Mediating Tribal Conflict

by Patrick James Christian

Nova Southeastern University Graduate School of Humanities & Social Science, Department of Conflict Analysis & Resolution

Table of Contents
Introduction: a new approach to engaging intrastate conflict 3
Mediating Emerging Culture Conflict: Process & Technique 4
Stage one – discovering the conflict story 5
Stage two – externalizing the story and mapping its effects 9
Stage three – evaluating the stories and identifying possibilities for restorying 12
Stage four – reimagining identity-meaning and restorying the conflict narrative 16
The Joint Mediation Session – Theater & Stagecraft 19
Theater 20
Stagecraft 21
Appendix A Tribal Engagement Model – Relations with the Political State 23
Appendix B – Group Identity Placement Model 24
References 25

Introduction: a new approach to engaging intrastate conflict
Emerging culture mediation is a relatively recent... more Introduction: a new approach to engaging intrastate conflict
Emerging culture mediation is a relatively recent approach to resolving intra-state cultural conflict in sociocentric societies in regions where governance is problematic, failing or non-existent. For the purposes of this publication, we define emerging cultures as communities bounded by blood, marriage, and/or ethnic ties that share a common language, group identity and who commonly express their identity through a shared culture. The ‘emerging’ part of the name refers to the community’s requirement to eventually adapt to a shrinking and changing world, often with insufficient guidance or support from the political state which is in the process of adapting itself to the demands of modernity. This mediation model adapts the narrative mediation approach of Winslade & Monk  to the types of conflict that these emerging cultures are now confronting due to the demands of modernity as well as political, social and environmental change. Such change creates barriers to the unobstructed or uncontested continuance of the cultures’ historical narrative, large group identity and possibly even their physical survival  (Geertz, 1975).  Often, the conflict disputes that emerging cultures find themselves embroiled in can appear intractable because the conflict pits a culture’s historical narrative and group identity against non-negotiable forces of external change.  These non-negotiable forces may place two or more cultural groups in opposition, but it is most often external change that ultimately drives the conflict. Examples of external changes that drive emerging cultures into conflict include environmental changes such as deforestation or desertification; diminishing common pool resources such as water, pasture or wildlife; national and regional political and social evolution; or finally, the loss of group membership due to the lure of modernity and associated ego-centric models of social being that entice younger generations into urban centers.  Such change is dreaded (Beisser, 2006) and resisted by cultures in conflict because it heralds the possibility of a break in their historical narrative; the same narrative that encapsulates their psychological identity, cultural expression, generational memory of their origin and existential purpose of the present.